


a string of now

by keire_ke



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 14:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14956679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/pseuds/keire_ke
Summary: The battle ends with Thanos dead on the fields of Wakanda, the gauntlet in Steve's hands, and Bucky bleeding out against his side, and all Steve can think about is that none of it should have happened to Bucky. He thinks it as he holds in his hands the object which can rewrite reality. It takes longer than it should have for him to realize why it was a bad plan.





	1. Part one

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Cap Reverse Big Big 2018 challenge, for [Threadberry](https://threadberry.tumblr.com/)'s prompt.

## I.

The weight of the gauntlet shocks him. He staggers when it comes loose, tries not to think of the hand falling out of it, severed mid forearm. It feels like he's hefting a car, almost, but it's only what, a glove of… gold? Granted, Steve has no experience with gold; he's touched a wedding ring, his mother's, once, but that was it. This feels heavier, like the weight of the gems is dragging it down.

The spear – is it a spear? The flared tip makes him think there's a specific word for it – is buried in the tree trunk nearby. The purple smears run down the shaft, which—

Well. A lot of the ground around them is purple. Thanos kneels, and howls, and glares at Steve, like his gaze alone could incinerate him on the spot.

It can't. Not when Steve's has the gauntlet in his hands, and Thanos is injured. He's not staying down, however, even though his arm is hemorrhaging, and the blood turns the ground into purple mud.

"You die," Thanos rasps, but then a bullet catches him on the side of the head, and then another, and maybe his skin is tough, but the bullets strike with surgical precision, and they are followed by another spear and then…

And then it is over. Thanos collapses with a squelch into the ichor and mud. It feels like an age before the body settles on the warm ground, finally lifeless.

Steve looks up and breathes, until his heart stills. It's done. Thanos lies dead before him, the gauntlet is in his hands. It's over.

Only then does he look to the side, to where the spear had come from. Bucky looks back at him, and he smiles. The smile doesn't leave his face even as he presses a fist hard against his side, to stem the flow of blood.

Steve is on his side in a heartbeat, putting his own hand over Bucky's and pressing, hard as he can.

"Jesus, Buck," he whispers, and gasps.

"Gonna be okay," Bucky whispers back.

"This shouldn't have happened to you."

"Yeah, well." Buck sighs deeply, winces, and, rather casually, raises his hand over Steve's shoulder, to shoot at a noise behind his back. The recoil of the gun has his elbow grazing Steve's shoulder, and Bucky lets out a hiss. His forehead is speckled with beads of sweat, and the blood that seeps between his fingers has a worrying dark tinge to it.

"This is not a good shade," Bucky says when he looks down. There's a green sheen on his fingertips, where the residue of blood should be.

"We'll get you help, I'll—"

"Give it a rest, seriously."

"Buck…"

"I mean it." Bucky smiles, a tired smile that is barely a twitch of the lips, but one that Steve didn't realize he'd had etched in his soul since forever. To see it now, here… "I know it looks bad, but c'mon, I know my gut wounds. I've had way worse than this. Let them finish the fighting, then we can look for help. Everything's gonna be fine."

Steve looks around, but the war around him is nothing but flashes of light, vague shapes moving too fast too track, blinding spots of light, if he tilts his head just so. Thanos is dead, he thinks numbly. Thanos is dead, and Steve has the Infinity Stones in his hand, it's over.

It's over. And Bucky grunts against his shoulder, his warm blood spilling onto Steve's hand. There must be something poisonous in it, because Steve feels tingling where it seeps under his gloves.

"No," he says quietly. This will not end this way. He will not go through it again, he won't watch Bucky slip through his fingers. Steve looks down. Bucky is watching the battlefield with mild interest, his eyes flowing from one skirmish to another; a pattern like the flight of a bee, settling, recalibrating, returning. He's down to his handgun, the rifle abandoned in the grass, spent, so he looks, assesses the threats that come within range. Sniper's habit. Unexpectedly, Steve thinks of Bucky of before, of back when cents would buy meals and sodas, when killing was something the vague forces of nature did to you, despite your best efforts to keep them at bay with blankets and medicine, not something you did to other people. Joy was easier then, despite the ever-present hunger, and Steve was always so hungry. Bucky was full of joy, then.

Now, Bucky looks at him, with a shallow half-smile, like he can't bring himself to lie even with his face, and Steve feels the cocoon he spun to contain his rage and helplessness in the wake of his death unfurl. All the cracks, the hurts, the injury, all of this was on him. Because he couldn't do the one thing he spent his whole life wishing he could: he didn't have the strength to catch Bucky's hand.

Somewhere above them an alien is hit and slams into the ground with an agonizing screech, and somehow it's that sounds that breaks through the fragile lattice of will holding him upright. It feels like a hurricane tearing through the fragile threads, leaving ruins in its wake, and him in the center, shattered. Bright lights he cannot account for, biting, noxious breaths, then respite, and pain.

There are voices around him; Sam's mainly. Steve can't make out the words, but Bucky's weight leaves his shoulder. Natasha is kneeling in front of him, her golden-blonde hair framing a face that's streaked with blood and sweat, the grim lines etched into the creases of her skin.

"Report," she says curtly, but Steve can't do more than shake his head. "Let go."

Steve's fingers open at the command, and the weight of the gauntlet is lifted away. Natasha grunts under the weight, turns and starts talking to someone at her side. Steve watches the grass at his knees, the sharp shadows cast by the blades in the Wakandan sun. Light breeze ruffles the grass and his hair, and Steve breathes, breathes in the air that's not suffused with terror and battle.

"On your feet," he hears Natasha say, and obediently he forces his feet under him, follows her into a grounded transporter. "Get some rest," she says. "You've done well." He lays down on the floor where she points, closes his eyes. A Natalia-shaped shadow blacks out the sun briefly, lays a blanket over him. He's falling already, the waking world slipping from his grasp, and he welcomes it, falls gladly into the cold oblivion of sleep.

## II.

He wakes and the world is pretty much the same it's been when he went to sleep. The sun is much lower in the sky, and the breeze is acrid with smoke, but the people around him are laughing, sleeping, relaxing; the Dora Milaje form a circle around Shuri, who looks dazed and a little confused, but otherwise unharmed. Other soldiers sleep, or eat, or chant; this is a familiar landscape, a battle has been won, maybe even a war.

The blanket slides off him as he sits up. One of the Dora Milaje looks his way, nods, and says something into her cuff. Steve struggles to match the movement of her lips to the few Xhosa words he knows, and he thinks he finally he has it – "he's awake". This proves true when, a few minutes later, Natasha's head pops up over the edge of the transporter.

"Are you well enough to do some lifting?" she asks. Steve nods, and tries to stand, but his head spin and he throws his right hand out to prop himself upright. Something's wrong with his left; not bad enough to make him pause, but significant enough to burn every other move.

Natasha gives him a long, careful look. "Hungry?"

"I could eat."

One of the Dora Milaje hands him a nutrition bar. It's Wakandan, so Steve's not really surprised when the eight ounces worth of pressed of bar leaves the aftertaste of fresh cherries in his mouth, and sends a spike of energy through his limbs.

"Better?"

"Yes. Thank you," he tells the Dora, and joins Natasha at the foot of the ramp. "What's going on?"

"Corpses," she says grimly. "Scores of corpses."

Steve looks to the sky, praying for strength.

"T'Challa's people sent over a few transports, but the crew is scarce. Everyone able was out fighting."

"Lead the way."

Steve lets a part of his mind shut down as he steps back onto the battlefield. The vast meadow is littered with… remains, of all kinds. Some of them are fused with metal, some don all colors. He doesn't think. His muscles can do the thinking for now, where and how to bend, how not to burn as he sorts the bodies, piles the invaders onto a dais and the Wakandans onto stretchers. Other crews are busy stripping the metal from the invaders, anything that seems like an impermanent addition, leaving only the flesh behind.

Natalia moves among the dead like her feet don't touch the ground; she stops by each one and touches the beads on her wrist, cataloguing those that have fallen before Steve collects them. It's slow work, painstaking. Soul-crushing, even. There are so many, Steve thinks, before he forces himself back into the stupor of not caring, not caring so profound he can heft bodies off the ground and onto funeral pyres, hastily constructed in a great circle in the middle of the meadow.

He lets himself breathe as he looks around. There are other figures out there, some of whom he recognizes as Wakandan healers. Healers and soldiers, weapons at the ready, are wandering the field, in case any of the alien warriors still breathes. The healers ghost over the battlefield by now, rarely looking down. It has been hours; those that could have been saved, were already being tended to.

It's not safe though, even now. Steve makes a wrong move and realizes, too late, that the hulking alien has one last charge left in it, though many must have passed it at this point. It lurches off the ground with a roar, and Steve is too tired to think; he raises his arm, blocks the strike of the blade, and with his right hand he rips an already torn piece of armor the creature trails, twists it and drives it back, sharp end first.

One of the healers looks their way, but Natalia halts them with a raised hand, when Steve shakes his head; there's no cause for concern. Steve winces at the burn in his shoulder, but moves on immediately.

They work well into the night, until even Natasha gives in to exhaustion and leads Steve back to the transporter. "Can I see Bucky now?" he asks, when she slides underneath the bench and pulls a blanket up to her chin.

The gold in her hair shines as she cocks her head to the side. "What?"

"I want to see Bucky."

"Not now," she says, after a few long moments have passed.

"Have you heard from Sam? Thor?"

"Sam's in the field hospital. He's got several broken bones, but he's getting better. Thor went with Bruce to help out in the forest, a lot of warriors from either side went over the cliffs."

"What about Bucky?"

She stares up at him, frowning. "What do you mean?"

"Is he okay?"

He said something wrong, he knows it right away. Natalia unfolds, shucks the blanket and stands up. Her shoulders are tense, her hands curled into fists. "Rogers. What do you mean 'what about Bucky?'"

"I want to know what happened to him. He was injured."

"Yes."

Now Steve's not sure what's going on, but he sure as hell isn't finding it funny. "Natasha, what the fuck is your problem?"

Her eyes widen a fraction at the use of her name, a warning sign on all fronts.

"Rogers, what's gotten into you?"

"What's gotten into me?"

"Bucky's dead," she says.

She says... that...

…Steve staggers.

"No, no—" He can't be dead. He said he was going to be fine. He said everything was going to be fine.

"Rogers," she says again, and he lifts his head to look at her. Her face is blurry, laces with flares from the lanterns positioned in every corner of the barge. "Rogers, what the hell is wrong with you?"

"I don't—understand," he gasps. "He was, he said he was fine. He said!"

He wouldn't have lied. He wouldn't! He fucking promised he would never lie to Steve, not when it was life and death!

The hiss is faint, but he hears Natalia unsheathe her stick. "Rogers."

But they haven't spoken, have they. Steve didn't really put much thought or effort into his well-being, during the battle and before. Bucky got there on his own, in the end, because there was always a crisis bigger and more important, more global, more sparks to fan into a fucking fire. Goddamn it. Steve slammed his fist into the floor, bit back the keen that threatened to rip his throat apart.

"He saved me, again, he saved me from Thanos, and he died, Natasha—" a blubbering sob chokes him, but he keeps talking, just spraying nonsense into the textured material lining the floor of the transport barge and his own fists, his own hands, still stained with his blood. "Why. Why couldn't it have been me?"

"You need to sleep," she says.

"How?" he howls, but of course there's an answer for that, too: Natasha summons a healer, and it is only moments before he is slipping under, under, hopefully falling deep enough to reach Bucky's hand on the other end.

## III.

Natalia is staring at him when he opens his eyes. They moved him during the night: there's the window, and a ceiling over his head. Sunshine is coming in through the glass, bright and clear, and the room smells fresh and clean. For a hospital suite it is almost extravagant, and fully equipped to host parties. Sam is standing in the corner, hip propped against a chair. His upper torso is wrapped in what Steve's vaguely remembers from his own stay in Wakandan hospital, a kind of therapy fabric for sore muscles, but his face is closed off.

"Rogers."

"Natasha. Sam."

"How are you feeling?"

Dead, he wants to say. He says nothing.

"What happened?" she asks, and her voice is surprisingly gentle.

"He's really dead, isn't he?" Steve asks, averting his gaze.

"There's only so much that can be done, with those injuries," Sam says. His voice is flat. Steve gets it. He and Bucky didn't really get along.

"It didn't look that bad, I thought for sure T'Challa's people would be able to help…" he's losing the ability to speak again. Not ideal.

It wasn't fucking fair. He was finally going to do something, now that Thanos was over with. He was going to… retire, hard as it would be. He would do it. He would take Bucky with him, get a nice place in Brooklyn, and God, Bucky would ride his ass about being a reckless idiot all the time, he'd whine and bitch and keep him from throwing himself head-first into every conflict he could google. He would be happy there, with only as much fighting as happened in the actual neighborhood (Steve was reasonably realistic). Bucky'd have a Twitter handle. He'd be a goddamned Brooklyn hipster.

They'd go to Starbucks every morning.

"Get some rest, Steve," Natasha says. The dress she's wearing rustles as she stands, hooks her arm into Sam's and leaves the room, leaving Steve to stare at the shifting grey surface opposite the bed. A nurse bustles in soon after, followed by a tall woman, who is wearing scrubs, but who is also very obviously a warrior. Security, Steve guesses, though couldn't say why.

"Good day," the nurse says and reaches for the table by the side of his bed with only a hint of hesitation. The warrior doesn't take her eyes of him. Fair, he surmises. He doesn't feel stable. The wall by the bed boasts several dents, dents he probably put there himself, as he dreamt.

And he dreamt, he realizes with a jolt. He can feel the whispers of the dream still clinging to him, and it is not a feeling he cares to linger on. They were not good dreams.

He rather doubted he would have good dreams anytime soon.

"How are you feeling?" the nurse asks, in heavily accented English.

How is he feeling.

He's not, to be honest. Nothing seems to hold any weight, nothing is substantial enough to matter. His body feels like something he could pick up and carry over his shoulder, like something not his. He feels light and heavy at the same time, like he'd list to the side at the slightest—

Oh.

"We had to remove it," the nurse says, defensively, and the guard flexes, ready to spring. "The blood of the aliens is quite corrosive, and there was damage. It will be made better."

Steve rather doubts that. He stares at the awkward slope of his shoulder, eaten up to the socket by the alien poison.

He can't say he even misses it. He had an arm, now he doesn't.

He had Bucky back, now he doesn't.

"We are running scans." The nurses keeps talking, but Steve tunes her out. Let her. Let them. It doesn't matter anymore.

Nothing really matters anymore.

## IV.

They offer him a metal arm. Steve stares at it for a while, uncomprehending.

It looks like Bucky's. Not the silver one forced on him by Hydra, but the sleeker, half-organic Wakandan design, the one he had on him when he died.

His fingers trail the smooth surface, catching in the decorative golden veins, down the bicep, the elbow, until his palm is aligned with the metal one. He closes his eyes and lets his fingers slip between the metal ones, curling so that his fingertips can press into the plates covering the back of the hand.

"It won't take long to connect, but I will need to put you under," the doctor says, and Steve nods.

He will have this, for the rest of his life: he'll be able to see Bucky's hand holding his whenever he wants.

"I don't want it," he says.

"We have too many wounded right now to remake it right now, I'm sorry," the doctor says. "If the design is not to your satisfaction, maybe—"

"I mean I don't want it at all." Steve looks the man in the eye. "I'm sorry, I know it's ungrateful, but I can't. I hope you can rewire it and give it to someone else."

He turns and finds Natasha and Sam watching him, both with guarded, unsure looks on their faces.

"What?" Sam asks flatly.

"I can't, Sam," Steve tells him, brushes past and goes. He's not sure where he's going, only that he must go. Fortunately, the corridor is vaguely familiar: this is the same facility he took Bucky after he lost the arm, so he remembers if he takes the left now, he will make it to the large terrace overlooking the sprawling waterfalls. He is right. The walls open into a wide open space, overlooking a verdant cliffside and a rush of water which falls from its peak to the tumultuous depths below.

Natasha and Sam find him there, not fifteen minutes later.

"Rogers," she starts, niceties forgotten. "What is going on?"

"Nothing. We won. We get to go home."

"What was that just now?"

"I don't want the arm."

"Why the hell not?"

Steve stares at nothing in the distance, tries to get lost in the roar of the waterfall. "It's too much."

"Too much?" Sam asks, and Steve, even with his back turned, knows he is exchanging looks with Natasha.

"I'll learn to do without. It's no big deal."

"It kind of is."

"It looks like his," Steve admits eventually, when the silence in the shadow of the roar gets too much. "I don't want to look down and see Bucky's hand."

"It's… not his hand, you know that, right?" Sam is weighing each word carefully, like he's not sure where the question should take him. "Or anyone's. It's completely new."

"Close enough."

"Fine, we'll get you another one. It will take some time, but—"

"I don't want a prosthetic at all."

Sam falls silent, audibly so. "What the hell," he whispers to Natasha, and then to Steve he adds, "Since when do prosthetics bother you?"

"It feels more appropriate."

"No argument, man, but how do you figure? No offence, I'm sure you're not helpless with just one, but you won't exactly be of much use in a fight."

"I'm done fighting," Steve says. And he is. It is final. He's known this before, known what it's like to lose a part of himself to war, and the solution turned out not to be finding more wars to fight. Anyone ever banking on his intelligence should hold the time it took him to realize this against him, and now that he did, he wants to remember that, forever. Bucky knew it all along, and finally, at long last, Steve thinks he, too, understands. The metal arm had been forced on Bucky: he kept it, made it a part of him. Making it not a weapon, but a part of his body, was an act of defiance. Steve will do likewise with the absence of his own.

"Right..." Sam says, and it's more than a touch skeptical. "What brought this on, really?"

Steve turns, annoyed. "You have to ask? I lost him, all over again. I had him back, and now he's gone, to this genocidal maniac. What the hell do you expect me to do now? Put the suit back on, pretend everything is fine? I tried that once: nothing was fucking fine, and everything was falling apart at the seams. Excuse me, if I don't want to go through that again."

"You had him back?" Sam asks with his eyebrow raised way too high for Steve's liking, and for once Steve allows himself to be angered by the insinuation.

"You could stand to be less of a dick, you know? I know you didn't get along, I respect that you didn't meet in the greatest of circumstances, you don't have to like him, but he is my best fucking friend, so take a step back!"

"Rogers, I have literally no idea what you're talking about," Sam says, hands in the air. "I didn't get along with whom, exactly?"

Steve stares at him, searching for any kind of clue this is a piss-poor joke. "What?"

"I mean I am not an idiot, I get that this is about Bucky, but also it kind of makes no sense if it is about Bucky, so... not really?"

"What the hell do you mean, not really?!"

"Steve," Natasha says, her eyes darting between him and Sam. "James died on the hellicarrier, during Project Insight, two years ago. They fished his body out of the Potomac after everything quieted down. The Winter Soldier killed him."

"Really? History lesson? Now?" Sam is yammering, and Steve can just look at them both with an increasing sense that the roar of the waterfalls if invading his brain.

"What?"

"Sam, quiet. Rogers – I have no idea what happened to you back just now, but this is the truth. Emergency services fished out James Barnes' body out of the Potomac in 2014. You were apprehended a year later, in the middle of a Hydra military base, one of many you burned down to rubble. You have been released from the facility for the express purpose of defeating Thanos, after which you will be expected to go back. We are all hoping you go without much fuss, as it took some convincing to let you out at all."

"That makes no fucking sense," Steve starts saying, but Natalia speaks over him, like he never opened his mouth.

"In February 1945 Captain America boarded a train carrying Arnim Zola. There was a fight; Steve Rogers fell from the train into a ravine, to his assumed death. Captain America piloted a plane full of bombs into the arctic, and was presumed dead as well. He was recovered in 2011, participated in the Battle of New York, and in 2014 was killed by a Hydra agent called the Winter Soldier, during the attempt to stop Project Insight."

"Steve Rogers is Captain America, and I'm still here," Steve says, thickly, but he sees the unforgiving truth in Natasha's eyes:

"The man recovered from the Arctic in 2011 had his identity contested, as relevant files had been redacted or destroyed, but the Barnes family was able to confirm conclusively, that he was James Barnes, brother of Rebecca Proctor. This was proven by a battery of DNA testing and positive ID of his contemporaries. The Winter Soldier's identity has been verified and confirmed by a number of World War II veterans during a hearing at the Pentagon." Natalia squares her back and looks Steve in the eye. "The Agent referred to as the Fist of Hydra was determined to be the same man who fell from the train in 1945: Steve Rogers."

Steve stares at her, letting the words wash over him, without grasping their meaning. He stares and tries to force the meaning out of his mind, and yet it all falls into place, framing an empty space just big enough for Natalia to deliver the final shot.

"You are the Winter Soldier."


	2. Part two

## V.

The worst part, the part that shakes Steve, is that he knows she speaks the truth. As the words leave her mouth he realizes knows things, things he rightly shouldn't. He knows her natural hair color is blonde, when his Natasha's is red. He knows the scar on Sam's cheek is from a shrapnel of a grenade he lobbed at him in the fight at the landing pad of the helicarrier. He knows, now, that the terror of waking in the snow, with his left arm torn from the elbow down.

Yet…

"That makes no sense," he says stubbornly, digging his hand into the fabric of the medical tunic. He knows all those things, and yet, and _yet_. There is a sheen to them, a kind of texture that makes them feel staged. Not real. He knows the prick of snow and blood in his nostrils, but he knows, equally, the tang of tears and metal on his tongue, as the sound of a train fills a gorge, and only one of them feels like it belongs.

"Which part?" Sam crosses his arms and gives Steve a hard stare. "Because I gotta tell you, I was there for a lot of it."

"Bucky fell. Not me. Bucky fell from the train."

Sam scoffs, but Natalia is staring at him. She doesn't seem to be blinking. "I believe you."

"What, just like that?"

"He believes what he's saying."

"That is not a high bar."

"Doesn't need to be."

Steve can't seem to find the words. "Natalia—"

"Yet you call me that. Interesting." She is searching for something in his face, in his posture. She must be finding it, because her body slowly relaxes, breath by breath, even as her eyes narrow with concern.

Steve shrugs and turns back to admiring the waterfall. He can barely see it through the wet film over his eyes, but he tries nonetheless. Behind him Sam and Natasha stare at his back for a short while, the turn to leave.

"So, do we do anything, or…" Sam asks, and Steve only barely hears.

"No." Natasha shrugs. "He's non-violent."

"Again, that's not a very high bar to clear. A lot of folks are not violent. We don't give out prizes for non-violence."

"He doesn't want to hurt anyone."

"Let him heal first, then we'll see."

Their voices trail off before he can hear their response, and if he is to be honest he doesn't even care. The sun keeps on shining, its rays fracturing on the mist coming out of the tumbling water, and, as he watches, the droplets become rainbows.

There is little comfort in knowing. Steve sinks into the memories, the jumble of now and before, of this and not this. He remembers… death. He remembers the all-consuming fear, howling past his ears as he fell into the snowy chasm. He remembers Bucky's face, twisted around an anguished cry, as he clung to the side of the train, screaming, screaming Steve's name.

He remembers that same face, twisted with pain as Steve dug his metal fingers into a bullet wound in his side.

"No," he hisses, shakes his head. This isn't right. Can't be right. He would never hurt anyone like that, never, especially not Bucky.

But the memories are there, are vivid; Steve has a memory good enough to rival JARVIS, so maybe… maybe that's what it was.

He runs through the last day in his memory, and pinpoints the idiosyncrasies: Natasha's cold demeanor, Sam's distance, even the open wariness of the nursing staff at the Wakandan hospital. Natalia was being truthful, something has changed, something deep in the foundations of the world.

Bucky was dead, now.

Steve started. But he said he wasn't dying, didn't he. Bucky wouldn't lie like this. Steve would, no question, but goddamnit, Bucky gave him enough shit about downplaying his condition to have lied like that. The one time he had, Steve told him in no uncertain terms what he thought about this flagrant hypocrisy, had gotten shit in return, and the incident has not been repeated since.

So… They told him the alien blood was corrosive, that is true, but Steve touched it multiple times, and suffered no worse than he would when dipping a scratch in rubbing alcohol. The alien blood did no significant harm to flesh, then. He was short an arm, but the arm they have taken was metal. There must be substances which barely fizzle in contact with flesh, but corrode metal. Ergo, Steve reasoned to himself, Bucky survived the battle with Thanos. Hurt, perhaps, but not beyond saving, in his own estimation, and who would know better than Bucky what he would survive.

Yet he was dead for years here.

That did not add up.

Or maybe it did. Steve was holding the gauntlet when everything changed.

Maybe, if he got his hands on it again, maybe he could put things back where they belonged: Bucky, alive, finally free of the horrors of Hydra, and safe.

Steve opens and closes his fist. The gauntlet. Someone took it from him in the confusion; he didn't see them, but he was holding it here, too. So it was where he was, and now it has to be in the vicinity. They were in Wakanda, what better place to hide and alien artifact of such power?

Find the gauntlet, Steve told himself. Find the gauntlet, and you'll be able to turn things back.

"Hey there, brainfreeze."

Steve starts and turns. Stark.

"Tony."

"A little spider told me you're having brain problems."

Steve frowns. Tony's eyes slide down to the absence at his left side.

"Look, it ain't my place, and I'm not going to insist, but maybe reconsider the arm? I understand you had a nice dream back then, where the whole Hydra killer popsicle mess happened to someone else, and it triggered a crisis of some sort, which again, I am in favor of, but… it's your arm."

Steve stares. "Nice dream?"

"Natasha said you were under the impression you have been Captain America all along."

Steve nods, nonplussed. Dream. Ha!

"It was rather confusing," he admits, gauging Tony's body language. He is armed; the gauntlet bracelet is tight on his wrist, and behind them a couple of Dora Milaje shadow the corridor. But beside the gauntlet and the armed guard, he seems almost friendly. Maybe not friendly, but the way he keeps looking at Steve, then at the waterfall, suggests that he is not wholly on his guard.

"I've pressing matters to attend to, but well. I sort of promised? To maybe extend professional courtesies from one victim of circumstance to another? And the guy I promised it to is not with us, so I can't go back on it, or he'll get me in the afterlife. Given the recent events I'm sort of on board with the idea of an afterlife, so am trying to score points. You understand."

Steve listens to this with a frown. "Bucky? You promised Bucky?"

"I'm not naming names," Tony says immediately, but his shifting eyes betray him.

"Bucky asked you to help me?"

"No, he used emotion and my bleeding liberal heart to get me to promise I would make the effort. In case he wasn't around." Tony cocks his head and gives Steve a look. "Which he isn't. So I'm making. With me so far?"

"I killed your parents," Steve says, experimentally, though the words feel like lead on his tongue, but Tony barely blinks.

"Yeah, well, daddy dearest sorta was asking for it, what with the experimentation of dubious ethical standards and all. My mom, I grant you, I'm sore about. Sore enough to maybe become a wizard, but I'm not getting into that, because circumstance, and also magic is just the worst. I'm the bigger man, bygones, hallelujah."

Steve parses, nods, swallows. "Thank you. I am very sorry." If he lets his mind drift just so, he can pick Howard's face out of the swirl of memories, young and cocky, then old, bloodied and disbelieving.

"That is a marked improvement," Tony says, both eyebrows high on his forehead. "Well beyond what I was expecting."

"What were you expecting?"

"Bared teeth, crazy eyes, blood dripping from various bits, you know. The whole package."

Steve's not sure what to say.

"But, I'm glad you're doing better. I wanted to let you know that due to the tiny alien-related snafus all over the place, they won't be collecting you for another few days. I strongly recommend you use that time to meditate and reunite with your murder arm. We'll be putting in the request for extra amenities and even occasional outings, possibly even ice cream trips, so think about it. Metal arm might be better for holding ice cream."

"Collecting me?" Steve asks, numbly.

"You're going back to the facility for unruly superheroes," Tony says, with a touch of sympathy. "I thought Natasha told you."

"She did, I just… facility?"

"Can't exactly let you run about blowing up buildings and murdering people, and it came highly recommended. It's a non-profit and way up in the north, because… honestly, I just don't trust prisons in the south."

Facility. Prison.

Fuck.

Tony offers him another nod and a civil "take care", before making off. The Dora Milaje follow, but there is little hope he isn't being monitored. Steve closes his fist, and takes a deep breath. He has a day or two to find the gauntlet. He has a day or two to put things where they ought to be. Never mind the hollow in his chest, the one that his friends, his world disappeared into.

Walk it off, he tells himself. Walk it off and make it right.

## VI.

Refusing the arm is no longer a viable option.

First stop, then, is the medical facility, where a very flustered doctor makes a few calls and Steve is put under and wakes with a metal arm attached to his shoulder a few hours later. He stares at his mismatched hands, wondering if that's what Bucky felt when he woke up, then. If he looked at the alien appendage and wondered if it's even him any more.

Then again, Bucky woke alone, in pain and surrounded by people who meant him ill. People who looked at him like he was an unruly piece of machinery, likely to malfunction at any moment. Steve feels the echo of that fear, the foggy visual of his hands coming up and striking out at the doctors, in a blind rush of panic.

Now, Steve wakes to Natalia staring at him from the corner, her arms folded, but her face strangely sympathetic.

"How is it?" she asks.

"Good," he admits. The arm moves like it's a part of him. It is no surprise, given the standards of Wakandan technology. It is light, comfortable, even. Perfectly matched to his right. He curls his fingers, admires the light catching on the edges of metal. "Pretty."

"No pain?"

"None." If he closes his eyes it's almost like nothing happened, like both his arms were flesh.

"What now?"

Steve shrugs. Pumping Natasha for information is a risky endeavor, but she is the only one willing to entertain him, so he doesn't exactly have a choice.

"Did we win?" he asks, testing the span of his fingers.

"In a manner of speaking. Death toll is higher than we would have liked, but Thanos is dead and his army is being dealt with. Barring some details we are almost ready to call it a wrap."

"Did we lose anyone?"

Natasha takes a deep breath. "One of the Dora Milaje, about a tenth of the Wakandan army. Significant portions of New York and a few other cities all over the globe. Few people you don't know from other planets. Pietro took a brutal hit, we're not sure if he's going to make it, Wanda is trying to keep him going until the Wakandan tech kicks in. We're not sure if she'll make it, if he dies, but so far she seems to be winning."

"Pietro?"

Natasha's head tilts to the side. "Pietro and Wanda Maximoff. You know them, they were the ones who subdued you in Sokovia."

Pietro was still alive in this version of events, then?

"I remember," Steve says curtly.

If he focuses he can remember running into a brick wall of red light, of being forced into a dark recess of his already tenebrous mind until the Avengers show up at the scene. He doesn't want to go there. Doesn't want to remember things he will have to forget as soon as he finds the gauntlet.

"Thanos is not coming back?"

"His head was pretty thoroughly ground into the mud and the remains burned as best as can be done with forges capable of liquifying vibranium, so I don't think so."

"And the alien army?"

"Under control. The war is still ongoing, but per last reports the AED managed to stop infighting long enough to be effective."

A memory framed by concrete walls tells him that the letters stand for Alliance for Earth's Defense, but past the abbreviation doesn't know anything about it.

"That's a lot of alien technology going unaccounted for."

"Stark and Princess Shuri are on it. Within a month the planet is going to be swiped clean." Natasha offers a small smile. "Would be quicker, but Stark in Her Highness' lab is more of a distraction than help to them both."

"How long do I need to stay here?"

Natasha shrugs. "According to the medics, at least a few hours. They want to be sure the grafts are taking. The last time they had to work with an enhanced individual the prosthetic technology was much more primitive, their words, so they are not sure how well you'll respond to it." Her mouth twists at the word "primitive", which Steve figures to mean the technology of Wakandan past is years ahead of what the rest of the world has to offer now. "I'll leave you to your unlikely complications," she says, hopping off the cabinet she was perched on. "We're still trying get in contact with the rest of the universe. Believe it or not, kicking Thanos' ass gave us a solid opening into the interstellar markets, so the UN is in a mad scramble to work out a global agreement. Apparently, it is considered passé to not present a united planetary front."

"Sounds good."

Steve waits until she is gone, then he gets up. Stark and Shuri are in the lab, scanning for alien technology. They will know what happened to the gauntlet.

Knowing the two of them, they will know how to activate it, too.

Steve is getting home if it kills him.

## VII.

The laboratory is exactly as he remembers it, nestled in the mountainside. No one stops him along the way, which likely means he is being monitored in other ways, ways he—

Steve raises his wrist to eye level. Of course. Most of Wakandans wear one of those, neat beads along the wrists, surprisingly comfortable to carry. T'Challa has shown him how to operate the bracelets once: the bead with texture is for communication, the one with the oblong shapes traced into its surface monitors the wearer's health, the others depend on various factors. Steve has four beads on his wrist, linked by a gleaming rope. This might be the reason he's had no guards following him — waste of resources with the tracking device on his person at all times.

From there it logically follows that one of the beads is an incapacitating device. Why not? Per Natasha's stories he is dangerous, unhinged even. It would be sensible to have this. This is Wakandan tech, so it's highly probable there is no one watching, just some omnipotent AI evaluating his movements.

Well, let it. There must be a way to get it off, when the time comes, but for now it can stay where it is. No one told Steve he ought to stay put. No one can fault him for wandering. He has never been to Wakanda, as far as they are concerned. He is naturally curious.

He doesn't have to work hard to school his face into a grimace, and people leap out of his way as he passes. Affecting aimless meandering is a little harder to pair with the scowl, but no one challenges him as he makes his way through the gleaming corridors and into the research facilities.

Though he has to admit, he expected some resistance at the entrance to the lab, even a token guard. Instead, he is unchallenged as he simply wanders in, and comes face-to-face with Tony and Shuri.

"This is a surprise," Tony says, and it's clear he doesn't mean it in a nice way.

"I didn't mean to startle you."

"Can't say you didn't." Shuri breezes past, bearing an armful of what Steve would think are metallic balls, were he any less familiar with the tech. "What brings you to my lab, foreigner?"

"Natasha said you are doing cleanup."

Tony almost drops the priceless piece of technology at that. "Cleanup? Excuse me, the team digging through the fields right now are doing cleanup. We are doing a global sweep for alien artifacts!"

"We are doing cleanup, Mr. Stark."

"Technically, maybe, I'll grant you, but it's so much more boring when you put it that way."

"What's that?" Steve asks, pointing to a raised map occupying the middle space. He holds himself stiffly, as he other Steve would be spooked by too much technology, he is reasonably sure, and the map trembles at regular intervals. The particles that comprise it raise and fall, attuned no doubt to an electromagnetic wave of some sort, sweeping across a grassy terrain.

Sections of the map light up whenever the wave passes them, and echo, pushing the ripples further out.

"We're trying to tune in to the particular frequencies of the artifacts, so that we can use them to push the signal further."

"Why not deploy an AI though, it would sort through the debris—"

"AI run the risk of being corrupted by the alien programming," Shuri says absentmindedly. "We don't know how much of it contains technology, and to do this effectively we need to use the debris to boost the signal. We can't risk connecting to them, so it's safer to just use the frequencies."

Tony does a passable impression of a mad inventor shown up by a teenager. "She's got me there, not gonna lie," he mutters to an imaginary audience.

The palace is recognizable on the map, the architecture unlike most buildings Steve had seen in his life. It is also the one place that is lit up in a myriad of colors. Steve doesn't ask what those mean; he's been in the vicinity of the gems before. It has to be where the gauntlet is. The tightest security would be here, along with the people most knowledgeable about utilizing it.

This means the palace is not going to be easily searched, not when his every move is being tracked, and it would be madness to proceed as though it isn't. He must get rid of the beads before he comes close to the gauntlet. How does one cut through vibranium, Steve wonders, then slaps himself. He is standing in a laboratory which runs on the stuff. Shuri must have something that could.

Still, it would be naive to assume that there is no monitoring in the palace, other than the bracelets. He hasn't seen anything that resembled a camera, which proves nothing, much of the imaging here is not entirely visual, at least not the collection part.

Goddamned Wakanda, nothing looks like the thing it should look like. It's like waking up in the twenty-first century all over again. There's no guarantee he would be able to recognize the thing if he saw it, but then Shuri distracts him when she picks up a tool that looks like a vegetable peeler, bends over a work table and very carefully slices a thin stripe of a lump that sits in the middle. She brandishes the slice over her head triumphantly. "Idea! If we disperse the field through a vibranium mesh, we can do away with the pulse altogether! But then we'd be weakening the signal…"

Tony immediately drops what he's doing, dives for the computer. "Not if the mesh is exactly right — how thin can this be made?"

"Ooh, you want to calibrate it so that the mesh resonates with the signal!" Shuri is all but vibrating where she stands, and the nearly transparent slice she's just procured waves along with her bouncing. "We'll be able to cover whole countries!"

They continue to exchange long words, some of which sound entirely made up to Steve, but that's fine. They are distracted. Steve spies a slicing tool similar to the one Shuri used, tucked into the side of the toolkit. It shouldn't be missed for a while. Bless Natasha and he pickpocketing tips: Steve palms the device, and in a follow-up movement tucks it into his tunic, where it settles against his undershirt. Then he feigns casual interest in the proceedings, but he needn't have bothered, Tony and Shuri are both staring at the paper-thin slice of metal they are now pulling and perforating: they would miss an alien army thundering through the vicinity.

Steve makes another round, noting the equipment he doesn't recognize and tools he cannot fathom a use for – he'll have to ask Shuri when he's back home – before coming back to the projection. The map is showing the palace and the surrounding city, and the signal is pulsing, so it's possible to discern which floor the source is on, or would have been, had the scale not been so small. Steve throws a look at the two scientists, too distracted to notice. Okay, Wakandan controls. He can figure it out. This one, with the twirl, means go in, so if he strokes it just so… Steve holds his breath and the palace grows before his eyes. There it is: this close the representation shows that the signal is actually many signals, merged into one.

He's not familiar with that part of the palace. It's deep inside the structure, with limited access. There will be guards. Monitoring. Possibly panthers. Steve is not ruling out anything at all.

He flicks the image back to its original setting, and looks around. Tony and Shuri are still yelling at each other excitedly, about something he has no hope of understanding. Good, let them. He knocks over a pile of beads, waits for their heads to swivel.

"Sorry. Did I break it?" he asks, and piles them back up.

Shuri huffs out a laugh. "No worries, soldier, our things are not that breakable."

Steve nods. Things are more breakable than you think, he wants to say, but what would be the point?

## VIII.

There are hundreds of checkpoints embedded in the walls of the castle. Most of them should be benign camera-equivalents, set up to report unfamiliar movement, rather than anything that might hurt an unwitting intruder, but there are a few… Steve straightens his back when he recognizes a mark on the wall. If there is any overlap between the castle's defenses, the security in this section may be equipped with tranquilizers. He is banking on being able to trust T'Challa of his universe to have been truthful about them, even though he has no real reason to be. Really, what responsible king would give an outsider all the information he needed to freely move about his castle? No responsible king, that's who. Steve grits his teeth and looks out the window. There is a sheer cliff immediately below, but the narrow parapet should allow him to slip onto the next platform down.

The problem here is that if he slips out of the castle the monitoring bracelet could alert whoever is monitoring him. They would know he was in the vicinity of the gauntlet and doing something he shouldn't be doing.

On the other hand, if he slips out of the bracelet now, someone will definitely be alerted. The architecture here will allow him to get two floors down, easily, but that may be for nothing if his estimate of where the gauntlet is was off. His estimate of armed guards showing up to his location is based on guessing and biased understanding of Wakandan security measures, it may turn out that instead of the minutes he is anticipating he will have seconds.

Down the cliff there is a turbulent mass of water, spitting out mist that keeps the vegetation climbing up the shiny castle lush, and that's just the mist that he can see. The whole side is probably very slippery. How fast can he move on something smooth and slippery? Can he beat the police, if he goes this way? What if they plan for it and show up on several floors?

Dropping the bracelet into the pool is a thought.

Unless… he is thinking about the directions all wrong. He needs to be going up, not down. Upstream, up from the turbulent pool, up the vines and trees. It's five stories, with decent footholds, and the solid chance that if he starts from the bottom, they will start by looking for him downstream.

Steve is not great at feigning casualness. He always ends up looking suspicious, to anyone with the barest hint of training, which is one of the reasons he stuck with his uniform during the war. It was, among other reasons, a reminder that he was wearing an outfit which wouldn't pass for anything short of clown with a USA fetish (Bucky's own words), so he should either come in guns blazing, or not be seen at all. It's up for debate how well it served him until this point, but he is here, and in one… well, 85% of one piece, and so he makes up his mind and goes to a balcony only a few stories over the waterfall bed.

Timing is key: in case the settings are more hostile than he imagines, he has to sever the chain holding his bracelet together mid-fall. If it goes badly, the cold water will be enough of a shock to wake him up again. Unless that is Natalia and Wilson were less invested in his survival than he thought, which remains an option. Steve clenches his eyes shut and tries to will the images of fighting them both away. No. No, absolutely not. They are his friends.

The tool he swiped from the lab should be able to cut the bracelet's chain in one go, and he does have sufficient experience in jumping out of places. He can do this. Of course, this will also end poorly if the waterfall bed is shallower than he thinks he is, but then Steve had done things much more stupid, with far less of an incentive.

What are the odds, anyway, he thinks as he swings his legs over the ledge, grips the slicer in his left hand, and jumps.

Turns out he was right. The chain stings him badly enough that he loses track of seconds and comes to just in time to jam his metal fist into a crack of the rock he was about to brain himself on mid-turn. The change in torque does something unspeakable to his shoulder socket, and Steve nearly drowns when the water fills in his scream.

There's an angry, red lesion on his wrist, though the skin does not appear to be broken: the beads carry a charge high enough to shock even him into unconsciousness, so Natasha and Sam were very concerned about his attitude. On the other hand, a shock of cold water brought him out of it, so… maybe things weren't quite on the hopeless end of the spectrum.

Still, the plan seems to have worked: he is free of the bracelet, though he lost the slicing tool, he is where he wanted to be, and, best of all, he is conscious.

Somewhere in the real world Bucky just had a conniption, Steve is sure.

The water is making it hard to think, so when Steve dunks his head and pushes against the current, it's all he has on his mind for a good long while. It's like walking in a hurricane, one that is beyond anything he could have imagined. He narrowly avoids braining himself on the bottom, until it finally occurs to him to climb, not swim, against the current. That proves to be a stroke of brilliance: the water is shallow enough that whatever ground he loses when he needs to surface to inhale a gulp of oxygen and a mouthful of mist, he makes up by slow and steady crawl along the rocky bed, as he fights his way to the less turbulent waters, and from there to the wall. The stream is all but calm here, moving the loose vines about, and Steve lets himself breathe the air that isn't half-moisture.

The climb, in comparison, is nothing. The vines and branches are strong, old, and look to have survived many storms, so even the weight of a supersoldier doesn't faze them. It's like climbing a ladder. Steve's going to have so many words with T'Challa about the security of his artifact vault after this. That's the plan at least, until he finds that the corridor is not as accessible as he thought it might be, and a dense lattice of vibranium wires generates a forcefield that separates him from the inside of the palace.

His laser vibranium cutter is on the bottom of the basin, or, more likely, well on its way down the river.

Steve stares at the lattice for a moment, suspended over the fifty-foot drop into boiling white basin, then he looks up, at the hand holding fast to the vines.

"Motherfucker," he whispers, and switches hands.

There is at least some vibranium in the arm, he knows this because it feels like his shield used to feel. Still, but somewhat alive, when he let his flesh rest against its surface just so. He reaches out and places his palm against the edge of the lattice, and snatches it back immediately. "Fuck," he hisses, and looks around. There was no disruption in the forcefield, but the spark was alarming.

Goddamned Wakandan tech. there must be a way to disrupt it, he thinks desperately, and feels his way around the windowsill. He finds little.

"Fine, then," he says, and brings his fist down onto the lattice. He does it again, and again, until enough of the material around it crumbles and he can dig his fingers into it, and drag the mesh out of alignment. The force strains the connection to the tissue in his shoulder, he can sense the bones creak, and it almost makes him smile. It's familiar, the sense of pulling the unwilling flesh to its breaking point, and Steve is an expert in managing the sensation. Two and a half decades of experience, baby, he croons and _digs_.

The stone crumbles between his fingertips, the forcefield flickers, disappears, and Steve slips into the corridor. If he's right, the vault is at this level, except… at least three walls away.

…which turn out to be less of a problem than he feared they would.

Steve waits for the final door to open, and there it is: locked away behind a forcefield and glass, the golden gauntlet. He takes a step towards it, mapping the confines for symbols he's learned, and stops. Someone is watching him.

Steve pauses. The muscles in his back pull the strained should back, his fists clench.

"I really hoped Natasha was wrong."


	3. Part three

## IX.

Sam stands in the shadows, his arms folded. Steve finds himself staring at his own face, reflected in a pair of red goggles.

"Sam."

"Steve."

He holds in his hand a pistol, or something like it; Steve's reminded of the device Natasha uses to shoot her Widow Bites. It's pointed right at his torso.

"Don't make me do this," Sam says. His outfit is a familiar combination of red, white and blue, layered over his torso like folded feathers. The straps of his jetpack merge into the pattern seamlessly. Bit different from the last time this Steve saw him, when it was greys and reds, still aesthetically pleasing, but clearly not put together for its looks.

"Wouldn't look good for Captain America to shoot someone?"

"Nah, Captain America will have no problem shooting you. Shooting it not too good for his enemies," Sam says. "He just doesn't want to."

"I am not your enemy, Sam."

"I know." Sam doesn't adjust his grip on the pistol. He doesn't move at all, in fact. "But you are not a friend, either."

"I need this, Sam. I need the gauntlet. I need to hold it for one minute."

"I know you think that, but there's no way you're getting it. Sorry."

"This world isn't real."

This time he merits a look, a quick, side-gaze. "Debatable."

"Sam—"

"Look… What happened to you was an abomination, and if there was justice in the world, you wouldn't be here. But you are. And I know it is unfair, but you have a chance, a real chance to make it work, despite the odds."

"By what, going to jail for the next hundred years?"

"If that's what it takes for you to get better." Sam heaves a deep sigh. "Look, man. It's not a prison, okay? It's… okay, it is a prison, but it's not a hole we throw people to ignore them forever. Hell, ask the Maximoffs. There's a whole bunch of doctors there, who actually do want to help you."

"I don't need help."

"Debatable."

"I shouldn't be here. I don't belong here." Steve lets his shoulders fall. The left side, already strained, slumps as far as the sinews and sinew-substitutes will allow. The weight doesn't surprise him, his body adapts to it without thinking, and yet, at the same time, the wrongness of it makes him stiffen his back in expectation of a punch.

"So what, you gonna try rewriting reality to create a world in which you do belong?" Sam lets the gun lower, just enough so that it's at his hip, though still pointing at Steve. "I don't think that's how belonging works."

"What's the fucking point of trying, if he's dead?" Steve blurts out, and the force with which the words come out him stagger him.

"Man… I don't know what to tell you. Other than: maybe try anyway?"

"And what, sit in a cell somewhere and count bricks until I die?"

"Let us help you," Sam says. "Because we can, alright? I promise we can."

"I am going back. I am going _back_. I won't let you stop me. I can't. You can't help me."

"No, if you don't want to be helped, then we can't." Sam shakes his head and draws a hissing breath. "What is it that you want, Steve?" Sam asks, his voice soft and soothing. "What do you need?"

"I want to go home," Steve whispers. And he does. He wants to go home, to his Bucky, the one who carries his ruined shoulder like a badge of honor, whose eyes and lips are a Van Gogh starry night, a pastel universe Steve would willingly lose himself in. "I need my home."

"Where is home, Steve?" Sam asks him, just as softly.

"I don't… I don't know." Snowflakes muddle his memory. The grey sky and the distant rumble of a train, echoing against the sheer sides of the cliff, long after the cars moved past the ravine. Pain, a swelling tide of it, gnawing on his side, at his soul, as he watched the train leave the ravine behind, and with it his friend, his Bucky.

"Hey…" Sam, or rather this strange Captain America version of Sam, steps closer. The gun is still in his hand, but the wings are tightly folded and the buzz which usually indicates they are gearing to spring out is not present. He reaches his free hand towards Steve, presses gently against his arm. "We will get you home, one day. You know that, right?"

"I don't know how I got here in the first place."

"I know. It was an accident. But it happened, you are here now. I don't know where home is, but I promise, I will do what I can to find a way there, okay?"

Steve looks past Sam, at the gauntlet. Maybe just touching it wouldn't be enough. Maybe he needs something else, something to trigger the thing in just the right way. But then he looks at Sam, who is lifting his wrist to speak into a communicator, and he realizes that this is not Sam promising to help him get back to where he knows his home is. This is Sam deescalating the situation. He realizes he is being placated.

He realizes, a fraction of a second too late, that Sam sees him realize this.

The world around him changes one nanosecond at a time. Sam lifts the pistol, but Steve is faster than him, and he kicks it aside. He doesn't aim to hurt, but when his metal hand closes around Sam's wrist he feels the resistance of the bone before he knows it.

The seconds drag the clock in his head as he stumbles across the room, hauling Sam behind him, towards the gauntlet, towards the yellow brick road.

The electric discharge into his side is an annoyance, like a mosquito bite. He shrugs it off, but the shock spreads throughout his body and he crumples, one hand extended, vibranium fingertips leaving gouges in the sheer glass containing the artifact. The last thing he sees is a discharge of energy from the marked glass.

*****

He comes to in what is unmistakably a cell. Even Wakanda cannot make jail look as anything other than it is, though it is significantly nicer than some of the cells Steve has seen in his lifetime. There's a TV in it, the Wakandan variety that projects images onto the entire wall, creating three-dimensional depictions of anything in the world, there are books, useless to him without a translator, and a bathroom hidden behind an opaque sheet of patterned glass.

Steve sits up. There is no door, but the opening in one wall has the shimmering quality he's learned to look for after one too many encounters with spaces he wasn't explicitly permitted to enter.

"Satisfied?"

Steve looks up, and there's Natalia, staring at him through the forcefield, her face, as usual, inscrutable. She is alien to him, this woman, but at the same time he feels an affinity, likely borne out of the wispy half-formed memories he does have from this reality. He has quite a few of those, he discovers as he stares at her, enough to recognize that she is shaking with fury.

He doesn't have to contort his brain into coming up with a reason for it.

"Did I hurt him?" he asks, in silent supplication for a denial. Please tell me I didn't, he thinks, over and over, because if I injured Sam, I wouldn't be able to live with it.

A sliver of ice melts and slides down the mountains in her eyes. "You left a bruise, we think. He insists that's from when he tried to shake Chief M'Baku's hand, and his case is strong. It's not an issue."

"I didn't mean to hurt him."

Natalia doesn't say anything this time, she just watches him, as someone else says, "We know."

The voice is enough to paralyze Steve down to his very core.

"Bucky?"

## X.

It is and isn't Bucky.

The hair, for one. Last time Steve has seen Bucky (held Bucky), his hair was long, his face was open, and his eyes soft. This one's coif if something Steve wouldn't look twice at in the 1940s, but his expression is closed, and his gaze could burn as only the ice can. His voice, though, his voice has changed the most: it's raspy and cold, and something in it makes Steve want to take a step back, even though there can be no physical challenge.

"Buck…"

"Hey Steve. What's going on?" Bucky cocks his head, friendly and unassuming, but the small disc he has clasped between his fingers is just a thumb's brush away from being activated.

"She said—" Steve swallows, and blinks back tears. "Natalia said you died."

"Natasha said you killed me," Bucky agrees, with a small smile twisting the corner of his mouth, and Natasha answers in kind. "I know. I'm sorry about the lying."

"I would never—"

"You did." This Bucky studies him, through most familiar face. "It was a freak accident I survived. We figure it was the cold water."

"I would never!"

To this Bucky merely snorts, and when he looks at Natasha Steve is struck with a misaligned memory, of pure, unadulterated satisfaction of watching him bleed.

He recoils.

"Why did you have them lie to me?" he asks, when the wave of nausea passes.

"Honestly, we weren't sure if your plan wasn't to finish me off. We figured it's safer to just keep it under wraps at the time, just in case."

"What if we happened to run into one another during the battle?"

"In case it's not obvious, I don't go into battle much." Bucky takes a cautious step to the side, revealing that his shadow is concealing a cane, one that his hand is wrapped tightly around, and that his balance is a precarious, hard-won thing. "Funny thing is, Doctor Cho tells me that in another decade or so it'll be like it never happened. Of course, she is also fond of reminding me she can reprint my tissues, but I think I'm a little old fashioned for that."

"Is it because…" Steve can't bring himself to say the words, but Bucky just gives him a long look.

"Yeah, mainly. The extended bath and brain damage didn't help, either." Bucky settles on a protrusion of the wall with a sigh. "Fuck, walking hurts. They have so many stairs in this goddamned palace."

"Why are you here?"

"We figured you'd be coming after that thing," Bucky says, nodding in the direction of the wall. Steve has no idea where he is in the palace, but he can guess Bucky means the gauntlet. "Natasha also said that you are having a weird breakdown episode, and that the likelihood of you trying to eviscerate me is down."

"I'm not going to hurt anyone."

"Yeah… maybe." Bucky watches him, like he would watch a target he is to bring down with a bullet. "I don't want to take chances."

"So what now, you'd cart me off to jail?"

There's a well of pity in the gaze directed his way, pity, which Steve can barely stomach, and regret, which stings almost as bad. "You killed a lot of people, Steve. Most of them Hydra, granted, but only most, so just letting you roam the countryside in search of more random bases to blow off the map didn't seem appropriate."

Steve clenches his fists and looks away. "It's not a breakdown episode."

Bucky doesn't even look at him. "I sure hope not." He shares a look with Natasha, then returns his gaze to Steve. "I was actually hoping for something like this, to be honest."

"Hoping that I develop split personalities?"

"No, and I don't think this is it." Bucky stares at him. "Do you have a split personality?"

Steve falters. "I remember some events… twice. Those memories are just there. Side by side. and I don't know if I can always tell the difference. I remember them both."

"Equally?"

Steve stares at him. "What?"

"I got in touch with some folks. Apparently it's been known to happen that a mind fabricates a whole new reality out of stress."

"That is not what happened! My world is real!"

Bucky looks down. "Yeah. I know."

Steve feels as though the ground is collapsing underneath his feet. "What?"

"We asked the doctors here to do a scan when we brought you into the cell. Your brain is totally different that it was during your last checkup two weeks ago. They can't explain it other than by suggesting a personality transplant, so your theory is plausible. I mean, now it's plausible. I'd have been a little more skeptical a few years back."

"I remember you falling," Steve says with difficulty. "And I also remember me falling."

"Pal, that's my least favorite memory ever, and I came out of it with the primary mission objective accomplished. Losing you was the goddamned fucking horror story of the century," Bucky says, and as he does Steve hears the harmonies he was missing. This is his Bucky, if only for a moment.

"Did… What happened after that? How did you end up here?"

Bucky looks aside. "Eh, well. There was the plane, half of it was gone, it basically went down all on its own. Turns out I can no longer die by drowning, for some ungodly reason."

"Yeah. Drowning is…" The worst. Drowning is just the worst. "I drowned, too."

"I'm sorry."

Steve lets the silence take hold. He does not look up; there is something disconcerting about looking at Bucky, always, but this version of him, this may be the worst thing Steve has ever seen. He sees facets of the things he knows there, he sees its pieces stretched into a fractal being which is a Bucky, but at the same time the turns and whorls are all wrong.

"What do you want me to say?"

"Honestly, I'm thrilled we're talking." Bucky offers him a smile this time, and it is almost fond. Wary, of course, but there is a soft, pastel undertone to it.

## XI.

"You will have to stay here until we get rid of the gauntlet," Bucky says. "I'll do my best to stall the folks from the facility while we search for a way to get you home."

"The king wants him out of Wakanda tomorrow," Natasha interjects.

Bucky grimaces. "Yeah, that's… that's not going to be easy. Can't you ask for a little leeway?"

"With what leverage? He escaped custody, stole from the laboratories, broke into a guarded vault, and attempted to steal a reality-altering artefact. Why would they want him here?"

"To be fair we knew exactly where he was going."

"Really, that's your line?" Natasha's mouth twists in a wry smile as she looks at Bucky, much like it would when her counterpart would look at Steve. He sees the fondness there, the affection, but something else, too, something unfamiliar. It makes him miss his Natasha even more. "'We knew what we were doing'? That's what you're going to sell the Wakandans?"

"Not my brightest idea, I hear you." Bucky shakes his head and grins at her, and Steve frowns at the lack of shimmer before them. The cell is open. He could make a break for it, if… okay, he would have to disable the beads, first. A fresh string encircles his wrist, and it is not just his imagination, he feels the pull as he moves his arm up. No one is taking chances again.

Smart, god fucking damn it.

"What is it that you are planning, exactly? We don't have a way to just skip realities, you know," Natasha says, as she sashays to a chair and takes a seat. Her back remains stiff, and her legs coiled, like she expects to be forced into action in a fraction of a second.

"I figure between Strange and Thor we can at least get a hint where to look."

"Bold of you," Natasha tells Bucky while looking at Steve.

Bucky curses, and his cane raps against the floor as he shifts his weight against the wall to press a hand against his ear. "Yeah? Oh fuck. I'll be right there." He looks at Natasha, who looks back, no trace of expression on her face, then turns at leaves. Steve doesn't watch him go; he doesn't think he could bear it if Bucky didn't look his way.

"You don't think I'm worth helping?" he asks Natalia, deliberately not looking at her, either.

"You have never not been a problem," she fires back. "Particularly for Barnes, who will try to set himself on fire trying to help you. But what really concerns me, right now, is that if he does that, and we get our Steve back, I will have more work on my hands, because that idiot will believe he can help him, too."

"Maybe he can be helped."

A deep sigh lifts her whole upper body. "It's not a question of if," she admits with obvious reluctance. "Steve—Our Steve is not beyond help. It's a question of how much will it cost. My problem is that Barnes is my friend. I don't want to lose him to a pipe dream that's out of his price range."

Steve nods. "I understand."

Natasha quirks her mouth at him, just enough so that he knows they are on the same page.

"You'd prefer if I were to stay. That's flattering," Steve says, even though his heart rappels a painful series of beats against his ribs.

"I'm sure you would prefer if our Steve was out of your universe, too," she shoots back and steps out. The forcefield shimmers into existence behind her back and Steve is alone.

It is a couple of hours before they both return, Bucky pale and leaning heavily on his cane, Natasha tailing him closely, watching his every move and intensely projecting that the first person to draw attention to it will get eviscerated.

"What happened?" Steve asks, mildly alarmed, but Bucky waves his concerns off.

"Nothing much, walking, prolonged standing, sunlight, what have you. Don't worry."

"Was it the gauntlet?"

"Also that."

"What are you going to do with it?" Steve asks, heart in his throat.

"We've done it. Thor took the gauntlet into space, to throw it into a sun."

"No!"

"Sit down, Steve."

"I need it!"

"You can't have it." Bucky's leaning on the cane, as he studies Steve with a detached curiosity. "I'm sorry. It's done."

"I need it to get home," he says. "You can get Wanda to tell you I'm not lying."

"I know you aren't," Bucky says, softly, and when he meets Steve's eye there's genuine sorrow in his gaze. "The thing is, Steve, however you ended up here, this world is real. Even if it was created three days ago, when you touched the gauntlet in your reality, it is real now. It's real to me, and if it's real to me, it's real to trillions of other people all over the universe. I will not let you unravel it to get back to wherever you want to be. I can't."

"You have no idea how it works," Steve says weakly, his mind reeling.

"You're right, I don't. But neither do you. You said in the vault that you don't think this world is real, so why should we hand you a weapon which can alter reality?"

"Where I come from—" Steve begins, but his knees and his hands are shaking. "Please. I need to go home. I need to go home." He doesn't feel the tears, but everything around him is blurry, the lights melt into puddles and flares. "I want to go home."

"I know, Steve. I know." There's a hand against his scalp, parting his hair. Steve lets his forehead fall against Bucky's stomach, as he weeps into the thick fabric covering it. "I promise I will do what I can to help you. I will. I promise you, Stevie."

The pale skin on the inside of Bucky's wrists smells of fancy cologne, Steve discovers when he turns his head, and weeps harder. In his reality Bucky took the cologne Steve brought him from Milan, dabbed a drop onto his skin and set it high on the shelf, where the intricate bottle caught the evening light the best. The goats didn't like it, he explained then, giving Steve one of his precious, real smiles.

That Bucky didn't hold him close or stroke his hair. He would, sometimes, sit on the grass, right by the hut, where the gentle swell of the ground afforded a foot rest, and feed his goats bread. They would nose at the folds of his robe, looking for treats. He would smile at them, as he stroked their backs, and Steve would draft a painting in his mind, nothing but saturated, rich oils and golden light.

What if that Bucky, his Bucky, was gone forever?

"Easy," Bucky's voice whispers. "Easy. I got you."

Steve sits up, slowly, wiping the last of the tears off his face. "Sorry."

"It's fine. I know it's scary," Bucky tells him. "I woke up in that weird alien New York, I wanted to cry my brain out, too. But it got better. And if we can't help you get home, it will get better for you, too. You just have to let us help."

"Yeah." Steve draws in whatever air he can through his stuffed nose, filling the cell with a horrible gurgling sound. Natasha holds out a roll of toilet paper in his direction. He tears a piece and holds it to his nose, trying to blow in between haggard breaths.

His vision is swimming. Spots of light crowd beneath his eyelids, and his fists tighten, closing around air, as the cacophony in his head blares louder and louder, filling his skull with shattering noise. Something moves around him, a blast of air from the ceiling, a shimmering sense of mild electrical charges travelling down his body; Steve clenches his eyes shut and howls.

## XII.

"—eve!"

"Steve!"

Steve blinks. His hands are gripping Wakandan fabric, thick with vibranium threads, most of which is bundled around his fist over Bucky's torso. Bucky stares at him, his eyes open wide, pupils narrowed to pinpricks. That's terror. Steve is looking down at Bucky and seeing terror in his eyes, and the sight shatters something in him.

"Barnes," someone growls, thick and guttural, and the word is followed by a crackle of electric charge.

"No, stop, wait!" Bucky throws his arm out. "Steve?"

"What's—" Steve starts to ask, but the light finally subsides and he can have a look around. The golden gauntlet is on the ground, just out of reach, and Bucky's metal fist is closed around his wrist, preventing him from reaching it.

"Barnes," Natasha growls again, and Steve lifts his eyes to find himself staring into an incandescent current crowning the baton she's pointing at his face.

"Stop. Everyone stop," Bucky says. His left hand is still locked around Steve's wrist, but his right is coming up to cradle the back of his neck. "Steve?"

"Bucky?"

"Скажите мне, где ты?"

Steve stares down. Bucky has blood on his face, a cut above his eyebrow and a capillary has burst in his left eye, but his eyes are now clear, and focused, free of the terror from seconds ago. "What?"

"Я не шучу, скажи, где ты?"

"I don't understand," he says, lifts his head and looks around. T'Challa is there, too, claws extended, which probably explains the burning in his thigh, and Sam is watching the whole thing with his guns drawn. Natasha is wide-eyed, but the baton is down by her thigh now, and her other hand is wiping the blood gushing from her nose. Steve looks at his hands, sees the blood there, and _remembers_ the crunch of her nose under his fist. It's a strange memory, a vision, like something he's seen in a movie theatre, not real life. Like it isn't fully his, but at the same time he knows it must be.

"Steve?"

"I'm home," Steve says and feels his whole body come apart. He collapses, realizing only belatedly that he is collapsing onto Bucky, driving all of the air out of him, but when his nose falls into the open collar of Bucky's jacket he finds no will to care. He breathes. He's home. He's home.

Bucky's hand is warm against the nape of his neck, and the grip of his left around Steve's wrist loosens, as he relaxes and matches his breathing to Steve's. "You're back. You're back."

Somewhere above the two of them there is movement, entropy creeps in and the pent-up energy is released into the ether. T'Challa lets out a deep sigh, and Natasha steps forward to lift the gauntlet off the floor. She grunts under the strain, and that's a sure sign the fight took a lot out of her. Sam holsters his pistols, moves to help, and, after they stashed the thing behind a forcefield, looks around. "So what, that's it?"

That's not it, but at the same time as the tension dissipates Steve finds that "that" becomes a string of anti-climactic laters, one after the other.

After the team of doctors stitch together the gouge in his thigh T'Challa has his scientists lock him within cage of revolving beams, which, as he is assured, are scanners, can do no harm, and will be over before he can work up a panic attack. Steve lies on the slab feeling his heartrate climb exponentially higher whenever the beam hides Bucky from view. The results must be good, because when the spokes finally stop no one is crowding him. There is just Bucky, holding an ice pack, which obscures the absolute relief painted on his face. Natasha and Sam watch them, equally relieved, but make no move to step closer when Bucky wraps his hand around Steve's elbow and pulls him towards the door.

Steve goes. He nods at Natasha and Sam as they pass, accepts the salute thrown his way, but says nothing.

"Are you hurt?" he asks when Bucky coughs and rubs at his nose.

"A little, don't worry about it."

"Did I—"

"I nothing. It wasn't you."

Steve starts. "I remember—" He remembers he was in the cell, with the other Bucky and Natasha, when he returned, and if the other him came back in that same moment, what if—

But short of going for the gauntlet and switching yet again, there's not a whole lot he can do, is there?

"Bucky… what happened here?"

"We can talk about that later. T'Challa said there's a bike we can use, hang on," Bucky says as they descend a flight of stairs and find a garage.

Steve follows him in a daze, unwilling to look away, even though some of the crafts stationed in the low space are extraordinary. Bucky, however, makes his way to a bike which barely looks worthy to be standing in the garage of the king of Wakanda, and gasps in delight. Steve doesn't ask, just climbs onto the back and wraps his arms around Bucky's waist, and only looks up when Bucky lets out a long string of delighted profanities.

"It's a hoverbike, Steve!" he yells over the rush of air, as they leave the Wakandan palace and zoom into the highway which will take them to the lake and Bucky's little hut. Steve closes his eyes and hangs on, one ear pressed against Bucky's back, over his heart. Bucky zooms past the buildings and into the forest, gleeful whenever the rough road justifies kicking the anti-gravitational devices into high gear and raising the vehicle to several feet above the ground.

Steve hangs on, watches the world turn underneath them, and he lets the shadows in his head coalesce and retreat to their corners. They aren't going anywhere, he knows. They will come back when he wants them least, the memories he earned and the shades from the other reality. There will come a time when he will need to draw them out, maybe even do something about their existence, but for now… for now this is enough.

They shoot out of the forest onto the brightly lit planes, the bike high over the gently waving grass, and Bucky slows down as they approach the glittering late and the hut. The goats grace them with a barely-interested look, as is their custom. They will come when Bucky starts rummaging through the fridge for snacks for himself, but until then they will settle for the grass, plentiful, verdant, and right under their hooves.

"Are you hungry?" Bucky asks, and if Steve had a dollar for every time he heard that question, in that tone of voice… Well, for one thing he would have been a lot less hungry in his younger years.

Steve thinks of Bucky as he was then, but instead of a vision of the boy he lost to war, he sees him superposed over the soldier, all the fragments that the man standing before him put together, and thinks, with force that takes his breath away, "I know you, I see all the pieces of you, here, now: this is what you are, and I love you for it."

"Yeah. I'm hungry," Steve says, and follows Bucky into the hut.

The goats, sensing the fridge is about to open, amble up behind them, grass forgotten.

THE END


End file.
